Over the course of nearly all my previous Boardrooms for Business Owners there often comes the question of whether we still love our businesses or have we grown to resent them? It’s sometimes a very scary thing to own up to no longer being in love with our business.

Thinking back to the heady days, filled with optimism and hope and the blind belief that our business was going to be totally different to anything else out there and facing the reality of running and maintaining a business can be quite a sobering thought.

In my own experience I have gone through several love / hate relationships with my own business but overall the marriage still seems in good shape. But what to do if the relationship is beyond counselling, what if every morning that you wake up you just want to strangle it, what if getting a job suddenly seems an attractive option? Sometimes difficult situations have to be faced and you have to sit back and think about what is best for you as a person – not the business. Because if you have fallen out of love with it, believe you me it will show to your prospective customers, it will show to your current clients and most of all it will be affecting you.

Of course, there are many ways to solve this problem, sometimes it just needs some group working to find out what it is you hate and fix it. It might be it’s time to sell up or – and this is the easiest solution because you are a small business and can turn on a sixpence – change your business and what you are doing for something that will light your fire again. There is nothing wrong with taking a totally new direction and just think how quickly you will be able to get anything you do off the ground because of all the experience gained.

We talk and act a lot around this theme at the Boardrooms and I am delighted to say that only one person, so far, has sold their business and one person packed it in completely (for the meantime) and both are so much more happy. Most of the others have ended up making some pretty fundamental changes.

For details on our next Boardroom which we plan to launch in January 2013, please email me